Water To Wine Series

If you have your Bibles and you want to follow along, we are going to be looking at the second chapter of John starting at verse one. While you are looking that up, I will ask a quick question. How many of you tend to watch some of those shows like Dateline or 60 Minutes? Mostly the older people, the above 40 crowd with a few exceptions. I personally enjoy them. A few weeks ago, I don’t remember if it was Dateline or 60 Minutes, but there was a story about a man who was a wine expert. He was a very wealthy man who ended up investing a lot of money in expensive wine only to be ripped off big time. What happened was he purchased several hundred bottles of wines over a number of years from some wine broker. He found out by accident that the wine he purchased was fake. He thought he was getting a 1961 Chardonnay and he actually was buying one of those $4 Barefoot bottles of wine that you can get at Giant Eagle. What was happening was this broker kid had a pretty good business going. He would sit at home and work on his computer and design wine labels that would be identical to the vintage wine labels and he would print up the labels and stick them on an old bottle and substitute cheap wine and sell them for up to $10,000 a bottle. This man was quite upset obviously because he had lost $2.1 million dollars. It was funny because it turned out to be only 1% of his inventory, but he was so upset so he decided to pursue this kid. He ended up suing him for $12 million dollars and got the money and put the kid out of business. Don’t do this at home. Today, as we look into the book of John, we see in this particular story that Jesus seems caught up in some sort of a wine scam so to speak. Jesus was not trying to take bad wine and substitute it for good. He was trying to exchange good wine for bad to meet their expectations, which would become really a metaphor for his entire ministry. We are looking at John 2:1. We are going to read the first 11 verses. That is pretty much the whole story here. (Scripture read here.)

This is the first miracle of Jesus. You are probably familiar with the story. The plot is very easy to follow. It starts out by telling us that “On the third day a wedding took place at Cana in Galilee.” Quickly, this idea of “On the third day”, we don’t know what John is talking about here. We don’t know if he is referring to the third day of Jesus’ ministry. We don’t know if he was referring to the third day of the Jewish week which would be Tuesday. We really don’t know what he is referring to. He may be referring to the third day after calling the disciples. We do know that there was a wedding at this little town called Cana. A little background on Palestine weddings is they were very big deals. When you have a wedding today it is a pretty big deal. I know some of you are involved in planning weddings. You know they can be very big deals and very time consuming and very expensive. I just read recently that the average wedding price is $28,000. Does anybody think that is low? It is pretty high. What do you think is the most expensive part of a wedding? The wedding dress and the bridesmaids dresses. The photographer. The food. There is a lot of money put into the food and the beverage. Again, it is a big deal, but it should be a big deal because ideally it is a once-in-a-lifetime event. It is a big event.

Back in the first century, weddings were probably in some sense a bigger deal because they would go on for seven days. There would be an extravagant party because the couple didn’t really get the opportunity to do much more the rest of their marriage. They were hard workers. They didn’t have money to be able to take a vacation every year. The wedding was the big event. People in the town would come to the wedding and people from outlying areas. In this case, you would probably have 200-300 people come through that particular week just to shower love and gifts on this couple. We don’t know how many people were invited to this particular wedding. It is suspected that 200 at the most, probably 300 people. We don’t know how many people were there, but as the passage tells us, we know Jesus’ mother was there and Jesus and his disciples had also been invited to the wedding. Those of you who have planned a wedding or are in the process of planning the wedding, do you have what is known as an A-list and a B-list? I have been on some B-lists. A-list is the people you want to come to the wedding. They are your first choice. Then when the people from the A-list decline, the B-list people get invited. It is just the way it is. You can’t invite everybody. This passage seems to imply that Mary and maybe Jesus were on the A-list. The disciples were probably on the B-list. They hardly even knew them. It is believed that Mary was probably the one who had the connection to the family there and at that time Joseph would have been deceased so probably Jesus would have been invited. Then somehow the half a dozen or so disciples come along. We know that this group is there.